Returns to education are important at the individual level, for the
individual herself, her family and acquaintances, as well as at the national
level. An educated person will add more to growth and output of the
country, might lead to more innovation and entrepreneurship, and is
likely to be a more active and involved citizen. Hence there are strong
reasons for educating all children irrespective of whether they or their
parents can afford to educate them: the positive externality argument for
mass provision of education. There seems to be fairly widespread
recognition of these arguments. Recently, in Pakistan, the politicians of the
country added Article 25A: Right to Education to the Constitution of the
country1. Most of the politicians and political party manifestoes
acknowledge the importance of providing quality education for all
children in Pakistan, yet, and here is the paradox, we know that about 25
million children between ages of 5 and 16 are not going to school and the
quality of education being given in Pakistan, especially in the public
sector, is very poor and the state spends only about 2 percent of GDP on
education2. Why is there not more of an effort, from politicians and the
state, to provide better quality mass education in the country?
Anas Malik, a political scientist at Xavier University in USA,
posits a framework that allows us to address this and similar questions
relating to our political system in the book Political Survival in Pakistan:

Beyond Ideology. Not surprisingly, as is true with more interesting answers,
the idea behind the answer is simple. "political leaders seek to retain office
and challengers seek to obtain it" (1). This simple idea has deep
implications. Malik, using The Logic of Political Survival (LOPS) ideas
developed by Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003)3 argues that given the weak
state and state institutions in Pakistan, where there is no recognition of
rights as a virtue of citizenship, and given the goal of politicians to stay in
power and stave off challenges, they will try to divert maximum benefits
to their winning coalition. This will, in turn, given limited resources,
imply that people out of the winning coalition will receive almost nothing.
It will also mean that the politicians will worry only about questions that
have an impact on their coalition members, and though they might
continue to use universalistic rhetoric, when it comes to distribution of
benefits, the coalition insiders will be favoured. This also entails that
politicians' efforts will be more focused on visible benefits (roads, street
lighting, water and sewerage facilities and building a school as opposed to
quality of schooling) that supporters can see and more on issues where
benefits can be focused on some people and denied to others (access to
water or paved roads as opposed to quality education). If a politician was
successful in forging such a winning coalition, since leaving the coalition
has a large cost (losing all the benefits that are coming to the coalition),
loyalty to the leader will be high in the winning coalition. This makes it
difficult for anyone to successfully launch a challenge against the leader
and explains why challenging dictators is hard (the military dictators in
Pakistan), or why launching movements that are based on promises of
benefits to all are difficult to make credible (it has taken Imran Khan and
PTI 15 years to be taken seriously as a political option, though we still do
not know how PTI will perform on the ballot box).